Rants & Reviews

August 2017

11 August 2017

The Cuban missile crisis in October, 1962 almost made me lose my virginity.

When all hell seemed to have broken loose so that the cold war was now on the edge of boiling over, we formed a club called NOSDAV: No One Shall Die A Virgin. NOSDAV. I was a sophomore in high school and that was the month I turned 15. I was very much a virgin, despite the efforts, from about age 10, of my uncle Saul, married to my aunt Eleanor, who felt me up whenever I escaped from my mother’s violence to their house. Later he unsuccessfully tried to get me to drink liquor so that he could do more. That was also the year before I met the first love of my life when she joined our homeroom class.

But in 1962 when we were all on the brink of nuclear war – and oddly enough it turns out that we actually were on that brink – all we kids could think about was the tragedy of expiring with our cherry intact. There were a bunch of us, boys and girls, and we made buttons that said NOSDAV and wore them around school. As things worsened on the international level, we huddled and made secret plans.

We were in Pittsburgh but not so far away was Wheeling, West Virginia. For us it had the reputation of being a wild place. When boys in my high school turned 16, they would be driven to Wheeling to pay a woman to take their virginity. In Wheeling you could also buy near-beer at our age. So we decided that we’d pair up and drive to West Virginia, to sin-city Wheeling, to get motel rooms so that we wouldn’t die as virgins.

I don’t remember who I paired up with, but the whole plan fell apart when the person who was old enough to drive (16) and thought he’d have the use of his parents’ car was grounded and we weren’t able to get there. It took a few days before it occurred to anyone in NOSDAV that we could actually fuck right there in Pittsburgh somewhere somehow. But by that time Kennedy and Khrushchev had figured things out and to my great relief I didn’t have to do it with what’s-his-name.

02 August 2017

I was disappointed in the Portrait Gallery’s annual BP Portrait Contest which I never ever miss if I’m in London for the summer. This year the five prizes were all awarded – every single one of them – to men painters. The subjects of those paintings were one boy and four women, two of whom had their breasts exposed. Fifty-some paintings were selected from 2,580 entries – and as far as I could tell, of those only three subjects were people of color. Of course the Portrait Gallery used the portraits of people of color in their publicity materials, raising false expectations.

The show this year was homogenized with rather moribund subject matter, lacking passion or excitement or surprising insights into the souls of the subjects. There were few attempts at creating new kinds of images, with the impressive exceptions of the mirrored Archipelago (above) by Brian Shields and the black/white/grey Another Fine Day On Elysian Fields Avenue, Nola (left) by Éva Csányi-Hurskin. There was almost no movement to be seen, everyone just sitting and staring, except for the wonderful portrait of lefty director Ken Loach by Richard Twose. You can see all of the exhibited portraits here.

I was gratified by a small exhibit on the same floor with photos by David Gwinnutt calledBefore We Were Men. These shots were taken in the early 1980s of young artistic gay men who were later to do astounding work. They were all part of the London underground scene, comrades in the experimental and outsider life. I was so glad to see two photos that included the filmmaker Derek Jarman. I met him several times through his partner who was the artistic director of an amazing magazine called Square Peg for which I wrote as part (briefly) of its collective. Derek was one of the first men I knew who became more and more ill until he died from AIDs. The visuals and my emotions of that experience have always stayed with me.

There’s a splendidly dramatic photo of Leigh Bowery (left) and other black and white shots of these guys as they gender-bended in their squats and cheap lodgings. It was a raucous anti-Thatcher sub-culture of gender rebellion, and I only wish the word “gay” had appeared in any of the copious copy accompanying the exhibition.

The Portrait Gallery in Trafalgar Square (entrance is free) is always worth a visit, not the least for its permanent collection of portraits over the generations –528 portraits of Queen Victoria; Jane Austen painted several times by her sister Cassandra; four images of Amy Winehouse, one of which is by Marlene Dumas; and Henry James by John Singer Sargent. The most prominently displayed portrait right now is a brand-new larger-than-life image by Belfast-based artist Colin Davidson of Ed Sheeran.